Bloom where you're planted.

Leave a light on in the dark, maybe you'll guide somebody in. Someone to tell you who you are. Someone to carry who you've been. ~tg

Monday, November 09, 2009

2 Steps Away

There was a routine on last week’s So You Think You Can Dance about a girl and her fear. I finally had a chance to watch it tonight and when I say I watched it, I mean I watched it over and over and over again. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a long long time. And it totally spoke to me. I have an incredible fear of being alone. There’s an element of that that is so incredibly ridiculous because my life is filled with people that I love, that love me. But I still fear being alone. I think that’s part of why I made the move I just did. I guess I just want to embrace that fear. Pretending it’s not there hasn’t really done a lot of good when it comes to healing, so I decided to face it head on. Some days, it’s really really hard. This last week especially. I found myself on several occasions worrying that I was going to fail in this job, that I won’t ever find a place that I really fit in here, that maybe I’m just not strong enough to do this. Really that I’m just crazy to move away from the people who love me most in my life and start again.

The song that was used with the routine about fear talks about being two steps away from loneliness. That resonated with me on so many levels. Right now with this move I think I’m walking a bit of a tightrope. I don’t want to fall into the loneliness that’s below, but at the same time I’m not sure the journey is going to be complete if I don’t fall off a couple times before I make it across.

Life is hard. This past year has been really really hard. I’ve found myself missing my friend that I lost in May almost as much this last month as I did when we first lost him. I’ve seen people that I had to look twice because for a split second I thought it was him. He’s been in my dreams and I still can’t even get myself to delete his number out of my phone. Isn’t that crazy? Grief is a lot like fear in that. It’s completely irrational. You can pretend it’s not there and some days you don’t even notice it. Then one day you wake up and it’s so thick it’s like a spiderweb that you can’t seem to brush away no matter how hard you try. I think part of me is just starting to wake up again. I’d allowed myself to become a bit numb with life in the last year. I think a lot of that was a form of self-protection. Sometimes life is just hard to process. I think it’s been a while since I really tried. For the last year I’ve been going through the motions because some days that’s all I could ask myself to do. I know that God won’t give us more than we can handle but the past 11 months have been rough. It was the hardest year that I’ve ever dealt with and I fear- there it is again- that this past year is just life- it’s the way life works. It’s the way life is.

But I need to learn to love through that. I need to learn that Joseph is not the only person I loved that I will lose. Losing him doesn’t make the loving him any less worth it. It just made it that much more real. I need to learn that our family is sometimes all we have and this past year helped remind me that I don’t have to be related to someone to be their family. I need to learn that I can succeed in this new place I’m in. It might not look like what I think it will but that doesn’t mean it’s not successful. More than anything else though I need to keep learning that life is fragile and tenuous and hard and that maybe we’re all two steps away from loneliness. It’s worth it though. It’s so totally worth it.